Anna Karenina eBook

came in again. “Madame Borozdina?
Tell her, tomorrow at two o’clock. Yes,”
she said, putting her finger in the place in the book,
and gazing before her with her fine pensive eyes,
“that is how true faith acts. You know
Marie Sanina? You know about her trouble?
She lost her only child. She was in despair.
And what happened? She found this comforter,
and she thanks God now for the death of her child.
Such is the happiness faith brings!”

“Oh, yes, that is most...” said Stepan
Arkadyevitch, glad they were going to read, and let
him have a chance to collect his faculties.
“No, I see I’d better not ask her about
anything today,” he thought. “If
only I can get out of this without putting my foot
in it!”

“Oh, I shall understand,” said Landau,
with the same smile, and he closed his eyes.
Alexey Alexandrovitch and Lidia Ivanovna exchanged
meaningful glances, and the reading began.

Chapter 22

Stepan Arkadyevitch felt completely nonplussed by
the strange talk which he was hearing for the first
time. The complexity of Petersburg, as a rule,
had a stimulating effect on him, rousing him out of
his Moscow stagnation. But he liked these complications,
and understood them only in the circles he knew and
was at home in. In these unfamiliar surroundings
he was puzzled and disconcerted, and could not get
his bearings. As he listened to Countess Lidia
Ivanovna, aware of the beautiful, artless—­or
perhaps artful, he could not decide which—­eyes
of Landau fixed upon him, Stepan Arkadyevitch began
to be conscious of a peculiar heaviness in his head.

The most incongruous ideas were in confusion in his
head. “Marie Sanina is glad her child’s
dead.... How good a smoke would be now!...
To be saved, one need only believe, and the monks
don’t know how the thing’s to be done,
but Countess Lidia Ivanovna does know.... And
why is my head so heavy? Is it the cognac, or
all this being so queer? Anyway, I fancy I’ve
done nothing unsuitable so far. But anyway,
it won’t do to ask her now. They say they
make one say one’s prayers. I only hope
they won’t make me! That’ll be too
imbecile. And what stuff it is she’s reading!
but she has a good accent. Landau—­Bezzubov—­
what’s he Bezzubov for?” All at once Stepan
Arkadyevitch became aware that his lower jaw was uncontrollably
forming a yawn. He pulled his whiskers to cover
the yawn, and shook himself together. But soon
after he became aware that he was dropping asleep
and on the very point of snoring. He recovered
himself at the very moment when the voice of Countess
Lidia Ivanovna was saying “he’s asleep.”
Stepan Arkadyevitch started with dismay, feeling
guilty and caught. But he was reassured at once
by seeing that the words “he’s asleep”
referred not to him, but to Landau. The Frenchman
was asleep as well as Stepan Arkadyevitch. But
Stepan Arkadyevitch’s being asleep would have
offended them, as he thought (though even this, he
thought, might not be so, as everything seemed so
queer), while Landau’s being asleep delighted
them extremely, especially Countess Lidia Ivanovna.